Cutting Room

The vast and minute details that lodge within the words “my life” come forth resplendently in these poems. Jessica de Koninck is fluent in the impossible Esperanto of God and cinder blocks, Elvis and glue guns but, also, understandably haunted. Life very much includes death in her poems, the way knowledge includes ignorance. A stubborn, jumpy vitality abides, capable of real truth-telling as it examines, discards, clutches, praises and murmurs about the relics of love and grief. —Baron Wormser